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Development of Rails 3 on schedule

The developers of the Ruby on Rails framework have, as promised, made the first beta of Rails 3 available within their scheduled time frame. Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson announced that more than 250 developers contributed to the release, submitting a total of 4,000 commits since the current 2.3 development line.

Rails 3 is a generally restructured version of the framework which incorporates its former "competitor", Merb, as the two open source projects decided to merge at the end of December 2008. It requires at least Ruby 1.8.7 but also works with version 1.9.2 of the scripting language. Further advances listed in the release notes include decent JavaScript support via the newly integrated Prototype and jQuery JavaScript libraries as well as a simplified routing API to improve the support for REST-based web applications.

The Rails 3 interface is designed to make it easier to add and manage plug-ins. Reportedly it also includes a mechanism that protects applications against XSS (Cross-site Scripting) attacks. APIs which are considered obsolete and have been marked as "deprecated" are highlighted via alerts. This is designed to assist developers with migrating application code written in a previous version of Rails without having to start reprogramming it straight away. A comprehensive discussion of the new Rails features is available from Yehuda Katz, who is one of the core developers of Rails and Ruby.